Text readability within the “game”… this is especially a question in regards to using VR HMD’s.
The next thing would be to create a file “directory” which would bring up a “Choose folder location”, and then set a “Document reader” type of thing to list all files within that directory. When the user selects the file, then the book opens up or something to allow the person to read the book while in VR. Seems like an interesting project at least.
I might be able to do this using the Web Browser widget. It occured to me after posting, although I’ll need to test it. Hopefully it has the ability to read PDF’s which all web browsers should be able to
Edit: After testing, the web browser widget does in fact show the directory, however, when the URL is pointed to the .pdf, nada, just a blank “screen”… or would that be a blank widget? Confusing, I know.
One other thing was that text readability in the web browser, at “book sizes” in VR makes the text almost unreadable. The DPI of the Rift just isn’t high enough :\
This is a really interesting idea, but I agree that the standard book font size may be too small to read and the rendering fidelity on text in general is only so-so in a VR headset.
Maybe a command line tool that converts the PDF into images would be an easier approach? With the number of open source PDF rendering engines out there, surely something like that exists.
Any movement on this idea? It would appear there’s a few people looking to do just this.
Also Higher Res VR headsets are getting released now so this may have a lot more real world application these days
Create a folder in “www” with a name which you desire (mine is PDF_Viewer)
copy “ViewerJS” folder and its contents from zip to created folder in www
Create another folder in PDF_Viewer (or what you call your first created folder) (mine is PDFs)
start wamp
Point UE4 Web Browser Widget to “localhost/PDF_Viewer/ViewerJS/#…/PDFs/file.pdf”
NOTE:
With this JS, you can show “.pdf / .odt / .ods / .odp” files
ODT = Open source version of .docx. Word can export
ODS = Open source version of .xlsx. Excel can export
ODP = Open source version of .pptx. Power Point can export.